Introducing a new interactive blog series: Credit and Blame at Work

I am pleased to launch a new interactive "series" on this blog: "Credit and Blame at Work".

I'm currently working on a book about credit and blame, and will give due credit to anyone who can post an interesting response or a helpful link in response to the topics that we will be exploring together.

Why credit and blame? Because in my experience as an organizational psychologist, consultant and executive coach, the dynamics of credit and blame are at the heart of every workplace, for better or for worse.

Credit and blame is where "the energy is", and can either be a source of cohesion and commitment or anger and resentment.

We'll be looking at the various ways in which people piss each other off in the workplace by the manner in which they either hog credit or deny blame. We'll explore the individual psychology, relationship dynamics, team dynamics, and organizational culture factors that help determine how credit and blame play out. Although we will often talk about how bosses use and abuse credit and blame, we will also talk about how peers or even subordinates can have a role in playing the blame game.

Ultimately, I will be developing an assessment that individuals and teams will be able to use to get a "360 degree" perspective on how well they do in assigning credit and blame. This assessment will have items like:

- Takes a balanced and fair view of credit and blame

or

- Is totally self serving in assigning credit and blame.

If you have a great boss or colleague who represents the paradigm of fairness when it comes to credit and blame, please describe how he or she accomplishes that.

If you have a boss who is totally self serving in assigning credit and blame, here is your chance to vent.

In either case, please make sure not to post company names, real names of any individuals, or any other identifiying information. That way, we can share, discuss and debate different kinds of credit and blame without ourselves getting blamed for any negative real-world impact on anyone.

Thank you in advance for making this an interesting and engaging series.

In my old position in an architecture/engineering firm, we worked in teams with "project coordinators" (the lowest level) and "project managers" (the highest level). Being the least experienced employee, I was a project coordinator. According to the official organizational chart, we were all on the same level and all worked directly under the head of the department. But even though we had only a handful of employees in the department, I never got any face time with the department head. There were no project meetings that I was ever invited to. The project managers would meet with the dept. head behind closed doors and could allocate all credit or blame for projects as they pleased, and I had no way of knowing what was said. Additionally, I was just about the only person in the department who didn't smoke. Other project coordinators at least had opportunities every day to privately chat up the boss and casually promote themselves or their ideas, by working things into the conversation. I know for a fact that a lot of politicking was done like that, and again I was left out of the loop.

I was the one in the department who everyone always came to for help, and I considered myself a model employee and thought everyone else did, too. I did excellent work and did it twice as fast as anyone else. I gladly handled all the drudgery, and also all the "tech-y" things that no one else knew how to do. Everyone wanted me on their team, and chose me over the more experienced employees every time. I never goofed off as everyone else did, and I never caused trouble or complained about anything. I sat at my desk quietly and did everything I was supposed to. It's funny that everyone always wanted the highest-profile, most important projects for themselves, but when they actually got them, they demanded subordinates to help them with the work (and also to increase their stature). The project managers would go home at the end of the day, but require their subordinates to stay late or come in on the weekends to make sure the project got done on time.

It was not until my year-end performance review that I discovered what my boss thought of me, and I was floored. I was given only "meets expectations" for all categories, and no pay increase. It really hurt me that apparently no one else in the department had sung my praises to the boss, and were actually using me as a scapegoat and telling the boss that I required a lot of training, which was not true at all. There were so many times that I saved someone else's hide, caught their mistakes quietly before anyone else did, stayed late to finish projects that were behind, or otherwise made these people look good. I stunned me that my boss could be that utterly clueless about peoples' abilities, and about what was really going on in his department. He obviously didn't know one thing about me (since he'd never interacted with me) and used my coworkers to assess my performance, never considering that they might have had ulterior motives.

After that eye-opener, I asked my boss to give me some projects of my own so that I could prove to him what kind of work I did (and also to let him see other people flail when they didn't have me to bail them out). He ridiculed the idea because of my lack of experience. That was a lesson to me about being the invisible, perfect employee, and that I had to start being a lot pushier. Eventually, after lots of nagging and arguing, my boss finally gave me a little more autonomy. Once he saw what kind of work I really did, he started giving me even more responsibility. But by that time, I had already been there nearly two years, watching others get raises and other rewards that I was denied. I didn't have any more faith in the fairness or integrity of the company, so I gave up and left. Maybe if I had stuck it out I would have had the eventual payoff, but I felt like if they didn't know by now what kind of work I did and what I was worth to the company, I don't know what more I could have done. I'd never had any real accomplishments there, but it wasn't my fault that I was never given the chance.

I guess this story is not so much about the boss stealing credit or giving blame unfairly, but about his obliviousness of when his own employees did. There was a real lack of accountability in the company, and people in other departments had left for the same reasons I did. You ought to be able to succeed or fail by your own actions, but I was never anything more than a "resource" to the "true" employees. People at the top get all the glory and all the pay, and the people at the bottom do all the work. You can't climb the ladder when someone is above you, kicking your fingers off. I believe most companies make the same mistake when they put employees in "teams" with a leader to work on a group project (when the true dynamic is that you're competitors, not teammates), but with no accountability at each separate task. Supervisors are asking subordinates to do certain tasks, ostensibly because it's "beneath them", but actually because it's the most difficult part and they don't know how to do it themselves. The boss looks at the project only when it's near completion of a milestone, because it's easier for him to do that than keeping tabs on individual contributions. But that's where the opportunity for dishonesty begins, and that's why companies lose valuable employees while keeping on the "dead weight", incompetent people who are good only at getting others to do their work for them, and then taking all the credit.

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Counseling responses found helpful in reducing self-blame are supportive responses, psychoeducational responses (learning about rape trauma syndrome) and those responses addressing the issue of blame.A helpful type of therapy for self-blame is cognitive restructuring or cognitive-behavioral therapy. Cognitive reprocessing is the process of taking the facts and forming a logical conclusion from them that is less influenced by shame or guilt.
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